Read Recently
Starting out the month of September, let's get the unpleasant ones out of the way first:
By the way, these contain spoilers.
Shape-changers by Jennifer Roberson.
My favourite used bookstore had a whole bunch of Roberson's stuff; and I was sure I'd heard the name before. I had certainly heard of the series, "Chronicles of the Cheysuli" before. So, on the principal that the price was right ($2.00 Canadian) and I wanted to find out what was going on, I grabbed book one of the series, which is this one.
The Cheysuli are the shape-changers of the title. Historically, they are the guardians of the Kingdom of Homana. At "manhood", presumeably adolescence, the young male Cheysuli (and only the males) go out into the wilderness and encounter a lir, the animal they will bond with. The Lir are slightly different from normal animals, smarter and capable of telepathic communication with their partner (and only their partner). The Cheysuli gains the ability to take on the shape of the same animal as their Lir.
Before the story starts, a Cheysuli warrior abducts--or maybe just elopes with--the daughter of the king of Homana. As a result, the entire race has been outlawed, declared demons. Every man's hand is against them.
The story begins with a young woman, Alix, who is the daughter of a poor "crofter". She is waiting by the river for a visit from Carillon, the Prince of Homana. By sheer luck, Alix encountered the Prince before and he now comes back to visit her, though both of them swear there is no romantic interest there. Alix refuses to be his mistress, and he says he has no interest in making her such.
Their discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a Cheysuli raiding party, who kidnap them both, wounding the Prince in the process (he is bitten by the raiders' leader's Lir, a wolf). Carillon is to be used for political leverage against his uncle, the King. Alix . . . well, they intend to rape her and force her to bear Cheysuli children.
Yeah, at this point the story began to go sour for me. Particularely as it goes on and it become apparant that the Cheysuli are supposed to be the good guys.
Alix is spared from that particular fate when it becomes apparant that she can communicate with the Lir of all the Cheysuli in the camp (we are only ever shown Alix interacting with two Lir, the afore-mentioned wolf, Lir to Finn, and the hawk belonging to Duncan, Finn's brother. The story does not make clear if all the other Cheysuli in the raiding party [or, for that matter, the other male Cheysuli she encounters in the course of the story] are pre-adolescent, or if their Lir are just more stand-offish than the two we get to know, or if Roberson was just too lazy to flesh out more of them than that), which makes it apparant that she, too, is of Cheysuli blood. In fact, we find out later that she is the daughter of the aforementioned Princess and her Cheysuli lover. This means that Finn cannot rape her and force her to bear his children. Cheysuli don't do that to their own women. Instead, they force them to marry one of the men and bear his children.
Now, personally, I don't see much practical difference between raped and forced to marry. Either way, she's not given a choice.
Alix falls for Duncan, the leader of the raiders, who at least doesn't threaten to rape her. Carillon is released early on, leading me to wonder why they bothered to kidnap him in the first place (there is alleged to be a prophecy that they think involved Carillon, but that doesn't explain this particular raiding party, which just seizes Carillon, rides along with him for a while, and then lets him go). Carillon then returns with a raiding party of his own and rescues Alix, having accepted that, as the daughter of the princess she is his cousin and should be living at the court. While Alix is treated well by almost everyone there, the King himself does not accept a half-Cheysuli as part of his family, and she has to flee the Capital, with the help of Duncan, who infiltrated the city to find her. Alix now has nowhere to go but back to the Cheysuli.
She and Duncan try to have a child, since that is one way Alix can ensure that she can't be ordered to mate with another Cheysuli not of her choice. Duncan is happy to go along with this, but once they get back to the Cheysuli keep, he learns that a former lover, more recently the lover of a now-dead warrior, is pregnant and claiming that the child is his. He promised he'd marry her when he was 8, so now he has to marry her. But it's okay; Alix can be his mistress!
She doesn't take that idea well. He doesn't take her refusal well. But things work out; it turns out the child isn't Duncan's, and he dumps the other woman and comes back to Alix, who welcomes him with open arms--provided he marries her.
Non-sexual complications get thrown in when Homana is invaded by a neighbouring kingdom, under the instigation of evil priest-mages who worship dark gods. Carillon is saved and joins forces with the Cheysuli, beginning to fulfill the prophecy mentioned above.
I went into a lot of detail on this one to try to explain why I disliked it so much. Throughout, I found myself comparing Alix's actions to the female heroes/protagonists of writers like Tanya Huff, Terry Pratchett, or even Mercedes Lackey. Alix's role in her culture is not to be a warrior, mage, or politician, but a breeder. She is to restore the Cheysuli to greatness by having children of great power. She goes along with this idea in a way that it's hard to picture, say, one of Huff's characters doing.
The men, also, aren't much of a group. Finn's a would-be rapist, and Duncan's an asshole. Carillon comes off okay, but he spends so much time offstage that he's something of a cypher. His motivations are never clear. The one man who comes off best in the story is the evil priest, who's a gentleman in his two encounters with Alix, showing no sexual interest in her whatsoever.
Oh, and the concept of the special guardian group with their telepathic animals, once mighty but now fallen into disrepute, to be saved by a woman who comes from outside the group but can communicate with all their beasts . . . does that sound familiar? Right, it's Dragonriders redux, yet again. Proof, if any were needed, that any bad idea can be made worse.
The Wild Wood by Charles deLint.
DeLint is one of my favourite writers, and has been for about twenty years. One of the first things I did when I got onto the Internet was to join a mailing list for fans of his work. I can't say he changed my life, or anything like that, but a lot of the writing I do these days is in a field inspired by him . . .
So it really bothers me to find one of his books as unappealing as this one.
This is, by the way, a reprint of a book from ten years ago. One can see some of deLint's later influences coming into play, such as a trip to Tucson and a growing appreciation of the desert landscape.
Eithnie is a painter, living alone in a cabin in the woods, somewhere in Northern Canada--Ontario, I assume, but it could be Quebec. This being a deLint book, she sees Faeries in the woods. There seems to be something they want from her, but she can't figure out what. Plus, she has to deal with her growing attraction to a neighbour, plus a visit from her lively but slutty cousin.
She eventually figures out that what they want her to do: put aside the trauma of her miscarriage, and concieve a child to be their new queen.
Now, I'm not down on motherhood (though, mind you, I'm not real fond of either baseball or apple pie). I mean, most of us had mothers, and I'm sure those of you who didn't are equally fond of your test-tubes, assembly lines, and sculpting sorcerors. But when I'm reading fantasy, I don't want Motherhood to be any character's sole contribution to the plot, never mind the hero's, any more than I would want Fatherhood to be all the male characters supply.
I dunno if I'm getting this through to you; why I was so disappointed with both these books. Maybe I'm just too much of a feminist?
The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty.
This book examines the contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus and finds that there is less of it than you might have thought. Well, I found it illuminating.
By the way, these contain spoilers.
Shape-changers by Jennifer Roberson.
My favourite used bookstore had a whole bunch of Roberson's stuff; and I was sure I'd heard the name before. I had certainly heard of the series, "Chronicles of the Cheysuli" before. So, on the principal that the price was right ($2.00 Canadian) and I wanted to find out what was going on, I grabbed book one of the series, which is this one.
The Cheysuli are the shape-changers of the title. Historically, they are the guardians of the Kingdom of Homana. At "manhood", presumeably adolescence, the young male Cheysuli (and only the males) go out into the wilderness and encounter a lir, the animal they will bond with. The Lir are slightly different from normal animals, smarter and capable of telepathic communication with their partner (and only their partner). The Cheysuli gains the ability to take on the shape of the same animal as their Lir.
Before the story starts, a Cheysuli warrior abducts--or maybe just elopes with--the daughter of the king of Homana. As a result, the entire race has been outlawed, declared demons. Every man's hand is against them.
The story begins with a young woman, Alix, who is the daughter of a poor "crofter". She is waiting by the river for a visit from Carillon, the Prince of Homana. By sheer luck, Alix encountered the Prince before and he now comes back to visit her, though both of them swear there is no romantic interest there. Alix refuses to be his mistress, and he says he has no interest in making her such.
Their discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a Cheysuli raiding party, who kidnap them both, wounding the Prince in the process (he is bitten by the raiders' leader's Lir, a wolf). Carillon is to be used for political leverage against his uncle, the King. Alix . . . well, they intend to rape her and force her to bear Cheysuli children.
Yeah, at this point the story began to go sour for me. Particularely as it goes on and it become apparant that the Cheysuli are supposed to be the good guys.
Alix is spared from that particular fate when it becomes apparant that she can communicate with the Lir of all the Cheysuli in the camp (we are only ever shown Alix interacting with two Lir, the afore-mentioned wolf, Lir to Finn, and the hawk belonging to Duncan, Finn's brother. The story does not make clear if all the other Cheysuli in the raiding party [or, for that matter, the other male Cheysuli she encounters in the course of the story] are pre-adolescent, or if their Lir are just more stand-offish than the two we get to know, or if Roberson was just too lazy to flesh out more of them than that), which makes it apparant that she, too, is of Cheysuli blood. In fact, we find out later that she is the daughter of the aforementioned Princess and her Cheysuli lover. This means that Finn cannot rape her and force her to bear his children. Cheysuli don't do that to their own women. Instead, they force them to marry one of the men and bear his children.
Now, personally, I don't see much practical difference between raped and forced to marry. Either way, she's not given a choice.
Alix falls for Duncan, the leader of the raiders, who at least doesn't threaten to rape her. Carillon is released early on, leading me to wonder why they bothered to kidnap him in the first place (there is alleged to be a prophecy that they think involved Carillon, but that doesn't explain this particular raiding party, which just seizes Carillon, rides along with him for a while, and then lets him go). Carillon then returns with a raiding party of his own and rescues Alix, having accepted that, as the daughter of the princess she is his cousin and should be living at the court. While Alix is treated well by almost everyone there, the King himself does not accept a half-Cheysuli as part of his family, and she has to flee the Capital, with the help of Duncan, who infiltrated the city to find her. Alix now has nowhere to go but back to the Cheysuli.
She and Duncan try to have a child, since that is one way Alix can ensure that she can't be ordered to mate with another Cheysuli not of her choice. Duncan is happy to go along with this, but once they get back to the Cheysuli keep, he learns that a former lover, more recently the lover of a now-dead warrior, is pregnant and claiming that the child is his. He promised he'd marry her when he was 8, so now he has to marry her. But it's okay; Alix can be his mistress!
She doesn't take that idea well. He doesn't take her refusal well. But things work out; it turns out the child isn't Duncan's, and he dumps the other woman and comes back to Alix, who welcomes him with open arms--provided he marries her.
Non-sexual complications get thrown in when Homana is invaded by a neighbouring kingdom, under the instigation of evil priest-mages who worship dark gods. Carillon is saved and joins forces with the Cheysuli, beginning to fulfill the prophecy mentioned above.
I went into a lot of detail on this one to try to explain why I disliked it so much. Throughout, I found myself comparing Alix's actions to the female heroes/protagonists of writers like Tanya Huff, Terry Pratchett, or even Mercedes Lackey. Alix's role in her culture is not to be a warrior, mage, or politician, but a breeder. She is to restore the Cheysuli to greatness by having children of great power. She goes along with this idea in a way that it's hard to picture, say, one of Huff's characters doing.
The men, also, aren't much of a group. Finn's a would-be rapist, and Duncan's an asshole. Carillon comes off okay, but he spends so much time offstage that he's something of a cypher. His motivations are never clear. The one man who comes off best in the story is the evil priest, who's a gentleman in his two encounters with Alix, showing no sexual interest in her whatsoever.
Oh, and the concept of the special guardian group with their telepathic animals, once mighty but now fallen into disrepute, to be saved by a woman who comes from outside the group but can communicate with all their beasts . . . does that sound familiar? Right, it's Dragonriders redux, yet again. Proof, if any were needed, that any bad idea can be made worse.
The Wild Wood by Charles deLint.
DeLint is one of my favourite writers, and has been for about twenty years. One of the first things I did when I got onto the Internet was to join a mailing list for fans of his work. I can't say he changed my life, or anything like that, but a lot of the writing I do these days is in a field inspired by him . . .
So it really bothers me to find one of his books as unappealing as this one.
This is, by the way, a reprint of a book from ten years ago. One can see some of deLint's later influences coming into play, such as a trip to Tucson and a growing appreciation of the desert landscape.
Eithnie is a painter, living alone in a cabin in the woods, somewhere in Northern Canada--Ontario, I assume, but it could be Quebec. This being a deLint book, she sees Faeries in the woods. There seems to be something they want from her, but she can't figure out what. Plus, she has to deal with her growing attraction to a neighbour, plus a visit from her lively but slutty cousin.
She eventually figures out that what they want her to do: put aside the trauma of her miscarriage, and concieve a child to be their new queen.
Now, I'm not down on motherhood (though, mind you, I'm not real fond of either baseball or apple pie). I mean, most of us had mothers, and I'm sure those of you who didn't are equally fond of your test-tubes, assembly lines, and sculpting sorcerors. But when I'm reading fantasy, I don't want Motherhood to be any character's sole contribution to the plot, never mind the hero's, any more than I would want Fatherhood to be all the male characters supply.
I dunno if I'm getting this through to you; why I was so disappointed with both these books. Maybe I'm just too much of a feminist?
The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty.
This book examines the contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus and finds that there is less of it than you might have thought. Well, I found it illuminating.